DRAGAN WENDE – WEST BERLIN (outdated trailer)

In the 1970s and 80s Dragan Wende had money, girls, champagne, drugs — and a Yugoslav passport. While orchestrating West-Berlin’s buzzing nightlife, he could deal and smuggle across the Berlin Wall. But 20 years after its fall, this Wall is higher than ever — in Dragan Wende’s head: he has not set foot in East-Berlin since 1989.

For me, Vuk Maksimovič — a young new immigrant from Serbia, Dragan used to be my distant and fictional hero-uncle from warm family tales. But today my Uncle is real: an eccentric pimp and small-time dealer who lives off social welfare and memories of a glorious past. While bragging and struggling for his own survival, he radically shapes my new everyday life in Berlin by procuring me jobs in a bordello or at gipsy weddings.

»DRAGAN WENDE – WEST BERLIN« will be a humourous and engaging documentary in which Vuk has finally moved to Berlin — the city in which he should have been born — to shoot a film about his legendary Uncle. He thus confronts and discovers his Uncle’s bizarre and tragi-comical world of veteran Yugo-immigrants, fallen millionaires, thieves and hookers before the backdrop of a time-capsuled and forgotten West-Berlin beamed straight from the 1980s. Vuk is both fascinated and repulsed by this microcosm of underdogs. But will he inevitably get sucked into Dragan Wende’s grotesque universe? And will Dragan’s own Iron Curtains finally be lifted again?

An underground family tale in a still-divided city — with a strong touch of decay, melancholy and surrealism. A glimpse of Berlin that you won’t find in any tourist guide.